A celebrated painter, poet and art critic, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, born in Surendranagar, Gujarat, has been an influential figure in the Indian contemporary art landscape for over 6 decades. As Chaitanya Sambrani proposes, Sheikh’s art style flows into a narrative sphere, taking on the responsibility of charting the world around him in a manner which lets the subject address that same world as their own. Sheikh’s projects, in essence, take, upon themselves, the idea that art is a medium for the masses to navigate what is around them. For him, art explains and makes sense of the world we live in.
With numerous teaching positions under his belt, including teaching art history in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, Sheikh has been consistently recognized internationally for his work and art style, being invited as a Visiting Artist at the Art Institute of Chicago, amongst others. For a figure who is so steeped in established education, it is interesting how Sheikh’s career actually began. In 1963, Sheikh, along with 11 emergent artists, began Group 1890, a collective of artists that meant to be the antithesis to, what they saw as, the banal art of the previous generation. The members of Group 1890 embraced the values of modernism that hinted at the idea of change. The collective held a single exhibition in October of 1963 at the Lalit Kala Akademi, Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi, India. To this day, that singular exhibition is the only existing record of the group’s exhibition history.
Sheikh’s work can be seen as a direct parallel to what Group 1890 intended to be, a medium for artistic storytelling, drawing from the country’s own rich cultural heritage and imbibing an ethos of modernity that runs intertwined with a socio-political intent. Indeed, a famous piece of his, titled ‘Speechless City’, is an artistic political commentary on the Emergency of 1975. The painting, made in the immediate wake of the Emergency, explores the consequences that may become a reality if a government is allowed to rid itself of its critics.
Awarded the Padmashri in 1983 and Padmabhushan in 2014 for his contributions in the field of art, Sheikh’s life and work can be categorically summarized by the idea of attempting to explain the ubiquitous experience of what it means to be human. There is a sense of magical realism to his work that grounds itself in the cultural and mythological heritage of India. Through all his work, spanning decades, Sheikh has managed to build a miniature world, one that contains his personal memories and the larger circumstances of the cosmos.
